Last week, the words “transgender” and “queer” were deleted from the National Parks Service website for the Stonewall National Monument, to demonstrate compliance with one of Trump’s executive orders. A biographical note about legendary activist Sylvia Rivera was nonsensically edited to read “At a young age Sylvia began fighting for gay and rights,” with no effort to even replace the deleted, dreaded word “transgender” from where it had originally appeared (following “and”). Historic descriptions about why Stonewall mattered were hastily truncated to read: “Before the 1960s, almost everything about living openly as a lesbian, gay, bisexual (LGB) person was illegal”—missing the two letters that made up what had been “LGBTQ+.”
Within hours, queer and trans groups and activists organized a protest at Stonewall to condemn the erasure, with hundreds of people rallying to condemn the administration’s attempts to edit trans people out of the nation’s history. These sorts of protests are now following each new Trump decree, every agency Musk has ravaged. The sites are expanding: from DC sidewalks to Congressional offices, from Stonewall to Tesla dealerships. The day after the protest against trans erasure, a small group picketed the Manhattan Tesla dealership, one of a number of actions across the country that day, each organized autonomously to locate the fight with Musk in any city or town where Teslas were sold. The signs and chants varied, but all illustrated the collapse of Musk’s business interests into his government takeover, tying his “Swasticars” to the “broligarchy.” On Monday, they were still popping up outside Tesla properties. In San Francisco, a sign was spotted in the dealership’s upper window: “We Hate Him Too.”
On Monday, also known as President’s Day, another wave of the Reddit-organized 50501 protests hit dozens of cities. 50501 seems to be drawing out some people who have never organized a protest before. “I decided to pick the ball up and do it myself. And I learned a lot extremely quickly,” said one organizer in Pennsylvania. Indivisible is now running with the Tesla protest idea, urging people to plan their own “Tesla Town Halls” wherever they are. “If you’re in Texas or California,” their guide suggests, “consider a SpaceX facility or X (formerly Twitter) headquarters.”
Mere weeks ago, media outlets were still publishing pieces asking where the “resistance” was. It seems we are now well past that: Possibly, that’s because “the resistance” is bubbling up in too many places to track. When we look back on these weeks, we may see a broader narrative was emerging: The rolling protests everywhere may turn out to be more sustainable than the mass one-day turnouts by which many judge the strength of a movement.